


For the Lehman

by karanguni



Series: Nasdack [12]
Category: FFVII, FFXII
Genre: Drabble, Multi, Stockmarket AU, real world AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-15
Updated: 2009-09-15
Packaged: 2017-10-15 04:49:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/157197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not a very clever idea to wear white in this city, Balthier says to Rufus one night, coming in late and unexpected and sweating.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For the Lehman

**Author's Note:**

> It's been more or less a year since the Lehman Brothers collapse and the general beginning of the magical financial downturn that has wrecked lives and inspired a bunch of irreverent fic. :D

It's not a very clever idea to wear white in this city, Balthier says to Rufus one night, coming in late and unexpected and sweating.

Summer is here again. Rufus no longer ventures out much except for when he needs his fix of gassy inhalation and the smell of kebabs sinking into his clothes. The night outside is filthy, filthy, filthy. The cuffs of Balthier's pants are dark and damp. Balthier's shirt is already halfway up off his chest. Rufus is watching, the same way he does from his tower in the sky, glancing out over the city as the sky turns maddeningly bluer with each day.

Mm, Rufus says.

Do your taxi drivers all go through some sort of training where they learn precisely how to drive through puddles and mess up pedestrians? Balthier asks from somewhere within the recesses of one of Rufus' toilets.

His apartment is flat and high and metallic and full of rooms, and very, very much full of right angles. It's a piece of New York that's nothing like New York. Manhattan only pretends towards a gird; it's full of ups and downs and curbs and insides and elevations. Its pretensions remind Rufus of Balthier. Rufus' apartment has to work to not get warped; by the Britishness, by the irreverence, by the heat. He keeps it steady with climate control, and doors, and edges.

No, Rufus answers Balthier with some carefully thought out languidness.

No? Balthier asks again, a shirt sailing through the air.

Mostly our pedestrians learn not to walk too close to the curb, Rufus says eventually.

That would be giving in, Balthier snorts over the sound of a zipper being undone. Man changing for the city instead of the city changing for man?

Rufus tucks his hands flat over his stomach and lets his head roll back over the chair. That's what this city's like, he doesn't quite say; he just watches Tseng, who is seated on the bed, cross legged with his fingers sliding over the keys of a laptop, hair pulled up, face serene, a world away from his own world.


End file.
